Trash farming is in common use, because of the advantage of providing humus to the soil from above the surface of the soil, at which place the humus forms without denuding the soil of nitrogen. However considerable difficulty is encountered when attempts are made to plant seeds when trash farming techniques are employed, mainly due to the tendency of equipment to bunch the trash, and this is most inconvenient and undesirable. Furthermore, if use is made of the rotary disc type of implement (which is the most commonly used) the trash is frequently partially buried by the soil thrown up by the disc. Furthermore, particularly when air seeding techniques are employed, the seeds are planted unevenly, falling at any location down the sloping side walls of a furrow, and the germination is then uneven and in some cases quite unsatisfactory. Thus, for example, in the U.S. Pat. No. 1,105,570 of LEA, the seeds broadcast beneath a sloping disc will be at varying depths, and consistency of growth is difficult to achieve.
Partly because of the ability of a disc type implement to slice through the soil, these implements are the most widely used in farm tillage operations. However the normal method of tilling a paddock is to drive from the outer perimeter inwardly towards the centre of the paddock, it being difficult to drive in the other direction, as a consequence of this continual cultivation of a paddock with disc type implements frequently results in a transfer of top soil which under extreme cases will result in portion of a paddock having only the clay subsoil available for growing a crop, and this is obviously undesirable. It may be noted that the aforesaid LEA specification has no provision for soil replacement.
When trash farming has been practised previously, quite often the stalks of trash project into the air from the ground and do not fall on the ground until the area adjacent the ground has rotted through bacteria action. The rotting is partly due to the higher humidity at the surface of the ground because of ground moisture and partly due to the existence of micro-organisms in the ground. It is desirable therefore that in trash farming the trash should be chopped as much as possible, and should lie flat on the ground.
The main object of this invention is to provide means which will reduce or overcome the problems mentioned hereinabove.